Let’s discuss these numbers:
Obviously, you can see some things right away. Clinton is much stronger with the non-white vote. Everybody has been talking about that, but we can see some other stuff that might help explain it. For example, shouldn’t Sanders be doing better with people who make less than $40,000 a year? In theory, at least, shouldn’t he be doing better with people who have some or no college education, and therefore presumably lower take-home pay?
But then look at those religious attendance numbers. People who go to religious services are completely shunning Bernie Sanders. Is that because he’s Jewish? Is it because he doesn’t seem very religious regardless of his faith tradition? Is it mainly an artifact of other economic or regional factors?
What this shows, interestingly, is that the people most likely to benefit from the policies that Sanders is promoting (that Hillary is not) are also the people least likely to support Sanders. People at the lower end of the economic and education scale are Clinton’s base. As a statistical matter, these are also people of color.
But, remember, black and brown progressives are considerably more religious than white progressives. They also skew southern when they aren’t strictly urban.
So, it’s hard to decide if it’s hurting Sanders more that he’s a northerner from Vermont or that he’s Jewish and not visibly religious or that low-income low-education voters are not likely to understand the policy distinctions he has with Clinton that would favor them.
You can’t change who you are or where you’re from, but you can get your message out. So, the answers to these questions matter a lot for knowing if Sanders has room to grow.
Absent a comparison of this national poll result with the details on the IA and NH polls is poor poll analysis and interpretation. More so this year than in 2008 when the final slate of candidates had been known for months and several televised debates had been held.
Today we still have Biden dicking around with “maybe.” Clinton with virtually 100% name ID.(I’m so old that I remember the 2014 election cycle national polls with Joe Lieberman leading the pack.) National network news total coverage of the campaigns as of last week — Clinton 83 minutes and Sanders 8 minutes (that’s about the same as Christie’s campaign has received). We should also note that Obama’s 2004 Senate race received national news coverage and at the Democratic National Convention he was given the keynote address slot.
The breakdown in the latest IA poll has Sanders underperforming with older and wealthier people. Overperforming with the youngest age demographic. Educational level not showing much difference.
I’m going to guess that it’s probably that they don’t believe he can get it(campaign promises) done. How many decades did it take to get a reasonable health care bill done? What makes anyone think that Sanders won’t have to put up with bullshit from his allies like Obama has? The House and Senate are going to have a lot of conservatives(even with a Democratic majority) and they aren’t trying to hear what Bernies’ selling. How’s he going to deal with GOP stupidity? Then, you have the mainstream media and they’re going to work overtime to make sure he fails. What makes anyone think Sanders is going to be exempt?
I find it interesting that Sanders greatest support is the middle class.
The information is very interesting but just how does it explain away the fact that Bernie seems to of amassed a very huge grassroots following?
Also if he was so doing as badly in these areas as this data implies, how has he been able to get so much support financially?
Seems some of the facts out way the validity of this stated data, does it not?
Soon as I looked at this my mind got a picture of Rove on Fox screaming how no way Mitt had lost. The outcome of this will be like all political battles decided when ALL of the votes are counted and not before.
So you’re saying that nothing will be decided until next June when the last of the primary elections are held and the votes are counted?
That’s not have the nomination process works. “Votes” do happen before Iowa. Just as Govs Perry and Walker how that works. The results of actual votes in IA, NH, and SC can change the momentum and direction of the election. For the Democratic nominations in 2004 and 2008 Iowa was almost everything for the nomination and in 2008, if the Iowa results held through the next dozen primaries, it called the general election as well.
Understanding that there’s a difference in when difference people have to make their primary decisions.
My vote on SuperTuesday in NC will only have available the information (and vote totals up to that day).
No doubt the scenario all of the candidates are entertaining is either lock it up by SuperTuesday or if still in a hole be able to have no resolution of the primaries by their end and either negotiate it out before the convention (as Clinton and Obama did) or have a open convention (which occassionally might not be a bad idea if the passions can be restrained).
It’s false consciousness. No other explanation is possible.
Those people simply do not understand where their true self-interest lies, and will need to have it explained to them by Sanders’ campaigns.
Done sensitively, I’m sure they won’t mind being told just how wrong they are, and how blind the are to self-evident facts.
There is another possibility. Maybe these people just like Hillary. A lot of people do.
That’s a more refined version of the the Catch-22 of the Democratic Party.
It is what the 1968 ethnic strategy (of called Southern strategy) of the Nixon campaign was intended to do. It was what the Moral Majority and the culture wars of the 1980s was intended to do. It is even what the non-stop political persecution, including this weeks smear campaign in the supermarket tabloids, of the Clintons was intended to do.
What is Bernie Sanders’s name recognition compared to Hillary Clinton’s right now? This early in the campaign, the answers for Clinton could be fairly firm and those for Sanders could be totally random and uninformed by anything association with Sanders at all.
The Don’t Know column is instructive. If Clinton’s numbers are firm and Sanders’s are mostly random, there is upside for Sanders but not for Clinton in the Don’t Know column.
The other thing to look at is the margin of error. Just how much variation is estimated for each of these cross-tabs? Which of them have more variation.
On income, Sanders is hitting his highest with the incomes most middle class workers tend to have.
What this poll doesn’t tell is whether Sanders is bringing any new people into the political process. Or Clinton.
I think that at this point it is incorrect to characterize low poll numbers for Sanders as “least likely to support” him. We don’t know yet whether they are or not.
This article seems like one of those fillers the media used to do during wall-to-wall coverage when there was dead information space that they had to fill.
The biggest problem is that it gives splits across candidates but does not provide a sense of who the candidates’ bases actually are. For example, what kind of religious or non-religious people makes a huge difference.
Here’s the link to the Pew Center Report. A good pollster.
Large enough sample size that a MOE would be below five for the primary election numbers and near of below three on the general questions. MOE is relevant when the population is stable. When the population is in flux or developing, it’s merely a calculation that that may be of no utility.
When the population is in flux, the MOE won’t be of no utility, it just will be wider, allowing for a broader range of possible values, right?
What I’m looking for is an estimate of the variance on those figures for the candidates. What are the upsides for Clinton, Sanders, and Biden? The Don’t Know is only a part of it. The degree to which the sample represents the population accurately is the biggie, and there is a huge gap in Sanders’s familiarity with the voters as compared to Clinton’s. And the big issue to watch is how Sanders gets introduced to the public as he gets greater name recognition. With a stealth campaign, he has more control over defining what voters understand about him. When the mainstream media discovers him and pushes him, it is the people who want to kill his campaign who have more control over the media message.
Polls are important only for marketing activities in the campaign–trying to match segments and interests. Or guage issue splits.
The details of policy that voters want to discuss with you are more important for political dialogue.
What turns voter out to vote often comes down to working hours, child care, transportation, reminders, all the GOTV votes. In the old days it was a bottle of peach brandy shared after voting was over.
MOE is a calculation primarily based on sample size. It’s the fudge factor for sampling error. It has nothing to do with future flux among the population.
The pollsters are attempting to capture flux in the race with the question on second choice. But the question always begins with, “if the election were today.” Thus all the polls are static for where those asked are on the election on that day.
At this point, a pollster could skip the general election match-ups question for white men and plug in 60% GOP and 40% DEM and be well within a plug a 2.5 MOE at the 95% confidence level come election day 11/16 for a Biden or Clinton contest against most of the GOP candidates. That voting demographic has become so stable in presidential elections that the probability of a DEM candidate getting more than 45% and less than 35% of that vote is extremely low. That’s what Gall-up in its 1948 polling — only it wasn’t white men they didn’t bother to poll but AAs. That’s where the art of polling comes in.
Very easy to miss subtle small hints in data that are in fact trends.
Or figure out how better to ask questions:
Gallup October:
Abstracting from national polls to first us primary states not a good idea.
A number of points, Tarheel.
On the question of new voters:
It would be difficult to see Hillary bringing large numbers of new voters given her long history of activity in Politics. Possibly a number of newly minted women voters, but not much outside that. It’s possible that Bernie will bring a large number of new voters from the HS/College new voter ranks, ala McGovern (no aspersion on Sanders as to electability). These people are notorious for not voting for the first few elections.
The Don’t Know column:
The highest rates are religious, relatively low income, relatively low education level. These exactly describe many white non-R voters of the South and Midwest. I would think, that its not that they “don’t know” HRC in the classic sense, but that they are uneasy about HRC. The R witchhunts of Benghazi and the emails is causing some of this. I’m also of the opinion that Progressive backbiting is having a effect. I personally know several people who describe themselves as progressive (in Central Mass) who use the terms “evil”, “cold, calculating”, “nothing but a politician” and so forth in day to day conversations about politics. This has an effect on listening people.
Sanders hitting big with middle income actually makes sense. HRC is perceived (and may well be) as incremental gains. Bernie (right or wrong) is perceived as someone who will try to skip the next 4 steps and jumpstart the wage process again. Whether or not he (or she) can actually DO anything is irrelevant. In this case, perception is all.
According to this report ages 18-29 are 16.8% of the population. In 2012 19% of voters were 18-29. Fairly close to their percentage of the general electorate.
What pct of the population are age 1 to 17?
1 to 17 are 0% of voters.
Approximately 19-20%. There’s no standard for age grouping for population statisticians to use which makes it difficult when trying to collect data from different sources.
The “millennials” (US census defines as born between 1982 and 2000) numbers 83 million and 11% won’t be old enough to vote in 2016.
There is an important distinction to be made among “first-time voters”, “voters, age 18-29”, and “formerly discouraged voters”. Those who are advocating for Sanders think that he appeals to all three, but that his strength in the general election will be with formerly discouraged voters who will come out because he is not a “lesser of two evils”.
I’m not sure that any candidate who files under the Democratic party registration escapes the “lesser of two evils” rap. But we will see.
Did I mention today how pessimistic I am about this election.
DK values are large. That is important for Sanders, and indicates a serious issue for Hillary. Sanders is not known still by a lot, HRC pretty well known by most. Thus, these are winable for Sanders.
“Other” suggests that O’Malley/Webb are not going anywhere, or that the poll was not well-conducted.
Less educated and less affluent voters are also those least likely to be paying attention this early in the process. So I think Bernie has a chance to catch fire. Not unlike the way Obama caught fire in 2008. So much is going to depend on his performance in Iowa. That’s his chance to kick the door in and gain some momentum going into the states where he’ll need to gain traction with lower income and minority voters. If he does well in Iowa, he should clean up in New Hampshire. If he doesn’t, perhaps New Hampshire could still give him a bump, though the result will certainly get discounted some by the press. I’d love to see these same statistics for just Iowa.
Actually, Hilary’s numbers are slightly higher with the top third income-wise than the bottom third, so I think it’s an overstatement to call the poor Hilary’s base. It’s interesting that Bernie’s numbers are solidly in the middle income, not the extremes, especially not the poor. Information could be a biggie here. Bernie himself has not been getting a lot of press and what there has been is all horse race. His message has only gotten out through social media, which tends to keep it within whatever demographic circles it started in. A big tell here will be the debate, as that will be the first time a lot of voters get to hear what Bernie is saying. Not everyone has facebook friends who feel the Bern.
The first Demo debate is coming up. The CNN ads for it shows all the names but features Clinton saying something like, “I’m your gal, you’re lookin’ at her” or something. No images of anyone else.
Let’s see how people do in the debates. I presume that Sanders will do well, but we shall see. The fact that he’s leading in the first two primary states suggests that people like him when they hear about him.
Subsequently, I saw an ad for the same debate on CNN with Sanders saying, “Looks like some people want a revolution.” A little menacing.
I am in FLA visiting my 90 year-old mom and her brothers and sisters (for her birthday). My sister, who belongs to the Daughters of the Confederacy, takes my mom grocery shopping and won’t let her buy Ben & Jerry’s because they’re communists. Really. My mom doesn’t like Trump but my sister does. My mother says that Bernie is that word that Americans aren’t supposed to be, by which I think she means “socialist”.
The thing that jumps out to me is the partisan affiliation numbers:
Liberal-leaning democrats are mostly decided: 44-31 for Clinton, with 13 undecided, 11 for presently nonviable candidates.
Conservative democrats are 45-19 for Clinton, with 28 undecided, 8 for nonviable candidates.
Seems like a lot of “centrist” Democrats don’t want to commit to Clinton, but they really aren’t ready to throw in with Sanders. This shows the delicate balancing act that any candidate has, and is my main concern with Sanders as candidate (and president, if we’re so fortunate).
I guess I saw a generation gap that has turned up in other polling.
Sanders is down 6 among those under 49, and down by 36 among those over 50.
Now this is odd, because Democrats under 50 have a higher portion of People of Color than those over 50. However, they are also far less likely to go church than their elders.
This is a repeat of 2008, when the defining split in Iowa was generational
If you look at the last Iowa poll you see the same thing. Here are the numbers in Iowa from PPP
Under 45: Clinton 45, Sanders 44
45-64: 48-20
65+: 49-15
Curious what role social media plays here. Buy the generation gap that defined much of the ’08 primary fight, and the general elections in ’08 and ’12 continues unabated.
Millenials voting at the same rate as seniors would scare the hell out of TPTB.
Bloomberg: Hillary Clinton Lets Big Banks Off the Hook for Financial Crisis
AIG screwed up big-time, but it was being duped by … wait for it … big banks. Big banks offloading the risk on all the high risk crap that they had put on their books.
Responses to Clinton’s claims ==
Matt Taibbi: Hillary’s effort to deflect blame from the banks for the 2008 crisis is pathetic.
Billmon: A BIG big day for up-is-downism.
more from Billmon
(Those listening to Clinton and not Taibbi and Billmon on economic issues will not be well-informed.)
What’s crazy about this whole thing is that in a sane country Bernie would be a moderate lefty and Chuck Schumer would be a moderate conservative. And Ted Cruz would hopefully get the medication he needs in said country.
What’s even crazier is that the majority of Americans agree with over 90% of Bernie’s platform. I suggest a group for younger people like the over 50 crowd has AARP. That would help make things a little more sane and Bernie wouldn’t be peculiar.
I’ve gotten calls for surveys like this (though not this particular one) a couple of times. I don’t recall if they were from Pew.
I’m reasonably accommodating to answer questions about my views for reputable outfits (if I’m not tied up at the time), but I’m not willing to answer questions about my income. It’s too easy as it is for J. Random Stranger to find out about me via a credit report, I’m not willing to give out my income to some polling outfit when I don’t know what they are going to do with that information and don’t agree that they need it. “It’s just for demographics purposes…” Sorry – not good enough. If they want to know my demographics, they can get a pretty good idea from Census data.
Polling done well, e.g., by the NORC, can help inform policy.
Polling to see who is “ahead” in upcoming political races is much less so, IMHO. Even seemingly sensible questions like: “If the election were held today, who would you vote for?” is objectively a badly formed question. If the election were held today, I would have spent a bunch of time looking into policy positions, the number of candidates would have been reduced to 2 (major ones), there would have been gaffes and mistakes and evil ads and so forth, and we would have seen how the candidates responded. I’m not simply being a Sophist about this. They can ask which candidates I might support, or what issues are important to me, or who I wouldn’t vote for, but that bit of nuance in an answer doesn’t fit into the bins that pollsters seemingly want to force their data into.
I gave some money to Bernie and Martin shortly after they announced. I haven’t given to Hillary because she doesn’t need it yet (or shouldn’t anyway). I want Hillary to be tested in a primary. I want a lively debate. I’m not wedded to any of them yet. I don’t want any of them to drop out before they’ve even debated each other simply because their early polling numbers aren’t “good enough” for some pundit somewhere.
The increasing rush to weed people out this early seems to me to be potentially very damaging if we don’t rein it in. I don’t want our future choices to be limited to people who can do nothing but campaign for 3 years before an election. I don’t want our future choices to be limited to only those who are independently wealthy or so old that they’ve got nothing else to do. How? Dunno. Maybe if there were national party discipline again it would help (but maybe not).
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
I’ll be very interested to see how the debates go. Currently, my take-away from this data is that Clinton is still crushing Sanders across the board, nationally. There could be lots of reasons for this — name recognition, his age, his ideology.
Personally I’m on the fence. He kind of reminds me of your crazy old granpa who the neighbors complain should be in a home because he’s always in the street yelling at clouds. He could have spent his time in congress yelling at clouds for all he has gotten accomplished there: 3 sponsored bills signed into law. 2 of them are to change the names of pst offices.
Still, I like his message. Lets see if he can get some more love from prospective voters than I’ve seen so far in these polls.
He fights. He is issues oriented. He is a zealot and that’s a good thing. We have been waiting for him. If he is too old he’ll have a stroke before the convention. I don’t see it happening. Don’t be scared, be like Bernie.
Non-White and Religious definitely overlap in the Democratic Party.
OT:Voter Suppression in North Carolina.
……………..
THU OCT 01, 2015 AT 02:59 PM PDT
The sneaky new voter suppression tool in North Carolina, uncovered by one of our own
byJoan McCarter
What Busa has found is illustrated in the above image: a systematic and very sophisticated effort to make the simple act of going to the polls much, much more difficult for North Carolina’s black voters. From Busa’s presentation:
North Carolina Republicans have been actively moving the goalposts–they’ve been moving polling places around like a crazed monkey on crack. They have been cutting numbers of polling places in some counties, increasing numbers in other counties. There has been no systematic analysis of the effect of this. All I’ve been able to find in any news outlet is, you know: a little local newspaper, say Winston-Salem’s, will say: “the number of early voting sites is twelve this year…by the way, it was fifteen last year.” That’s it. Nobody has taken an overall view. […]
The headline outcome from our analysis is that in 2014 white voters–71% of the electorate in North Carolina–had to travel an additional 119,000 miles from their homes to their nearest Early Voting locations…which is approximately equivalent to halfway from the Earth to the Moon.
I hear you ask, “how did it affect black voters?” Well, black voters–22% of the electorate–had to travel to the moon and halfway home again, 370,000 miles, in 2014, to get to their nearest Early Voting place. […]
Social equity. Rev. Barber was talking last night about how we should make moral arguments; we shouldn’t be talking about liberals and conservatives, we should be talking about right and wrong. And the right and wrong of it is that the well-to-do, like many of us in this room, have a much higher degree of mobility and a lot more freedom to say “I’m not coming into work…I’ll be a half an hour late, because I’m going to stop off and vote first.” Wage slaves in a low-wage job, which a lot of people of color are stuck in today, don’t have that opportunity, to tell the manager of McDonald’s “I’m going to be a half hour late today because I’m going to vote.” So, I really insist that excessive distance-to-poll is a poll tax. It costs you money to go vote, and the more money it costs, the fewer poor people vote.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/01/1426873/-The-sneaky-new-voter-suppression-tool-in-North-Car
olina-uncovered-by-one-of-our-own#
What docdawg has found is a full-spectrum systematic approach to voter disenfranchisement that is going to take a full-spectrum election law challenge. I don’t see the NC Democratic Party going after this systematically in all its manifestations. The NAACP is doing the movemental work and following up on the legal case from the Voter ID law.
This is something the Debbie Wasserman-Stauss should have been out ahead of but the DNC is MIA. And it is something that DOJ used to be able to pre-screen until the Supreme Court decided that the South were good ole boys again.
This is setting up an 1876-like situation in Southern states, especially in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. And I would not put it past the crazies to use violence should anyone actually try to get fair elections in those states.
We really need folks outside the South to start pushing back hard on this trend because it looks like the old Wade Hampton political playbook all over again. And the bottom-line threat is the same as faced Hayes: give South the power to disenfranchise minorities or there will be violence. Hayes folded because Northern Republicans were tired of hearing about the South and Hayes knew they would not back a more forceful stand nor would the Republicans in Congress stand with him. And Hayes was not a man of courage.
The Democratic office-holders should be out in front on this one, but they are strangely mute.
Most people aren’t tuned in, so they know Hillary Biden. The chart is probably true with those two head-to-head. But the casual primary voter (especially the poorer ones) aren’t paying attention yet. Let’s see what these numbers look like in January – then I’ll pay some attention to them.
But not much.
The only numbers that really matter to me are the actual votes. Everything else is entertaining but it certainly does not impact who I will support.
Yep.
The only thing interesting is movement. Bernie had a lot of movement, but it has slowed. DK is big. Lots of time to January, but what will the Democratic issue be? Not emerged yet. Unless it is, and remains, the email server.
January polling is probably right for this election cycle because the voting doesn’t begin until Feb. a month later than it did in 2008.
I’m for HRC, but I agree totally with you Oscar. These early polls are supposed to point out weaknesses in the candidates profile to allow him/her to address those weaknesses.
From this poll, apparently Bernie is weakest in HS ed, religious, lower income, non-white.
I doubt there’s much he can do about religious.
He’s trying to address the non-white issue but its an uphill road because Bill and Hill have 30 years experience on him.
He can certainly address the economic issue (and presumably will) with targeted tv ads. This is also targets the lower educated and re-inforces the youthfulness message.
You’re right. At THIS point, he’s not in trouble. He has opportunities. And part of being a successful candidate is to take advantage of those opportunities. If he can … wallah!!! presto change President Sanders. If he can’t … interesting side note to an election which hopefully sounds the death knell of the current KnowNothings.
Those identified areas are not yet tuned in to the race, so they haven’t heard of Bernie, mostly. Thus, name recognition means more for that group and that would be Clinton and Biden. They likely haven’t heard (much) about Sanders and they absolutely haven’t heard of O’Malley unless they’re from Maryland.
Hillary is a known entity, Bernie is not. People will go with the devil they know and they think Hillary deserves her shot after Obama won.
How much of Bernie Sanders’ lack of support among blacks comes from the stunt the Seattle Two pulled, grabbing the mike, not allowing Sanders to speak, and calling the audience “progressive white supremacists”? At the time it sure looked very Nixonian, a ratfuck, and it provided the media with loads of columns about how Bernie can’t connect with black people. Sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In real time, when the information would be relevant, good enough subversive actions go undetected (Ernest Withers for one) or the suspicions of some are easily dismissed as stinking-thinking. And sometimes when it walks and talks like a duck it’s only a young little lamb.
As in 2007, team Clinton has a lock on the AA vote. Early on Obama could be dismissed as “not Black enough” and America wouldn’t elect a Black POTUS; so, best to stick with Clinton. His win in Iowa was the signal that AAs could take him seriously and when they looked at him, they somewhat slowly (with the able assist from Bill and others on the Clinton team playing the race card) came to like what they saw.
Whether planned or fortuitous, the BLM action only slowed down consideration of Sanders by AA voters. A bit too early in the election cycle for it to have a major impact.
I hope he’s not a zealot, it almost never ends well for them, but I get your point, he’s a fighter. We’ll have to see if he’s also a persuader.
In response to Salunga above
Most low-income and/or black/people of color Democratic voters I know are very pragmatic. The main question about a candidate is… can they win? Because the consequences of Democrats not winning, for many segments of society, are not so much anger or discomfort, but possibly long-term devastation. Not that Democrats offer so much an alternative, but at least their platforms are not based on hate.
Most seem to think Hillary can win (I’m not so sure, but anyway…) But, with Bernie… I imagine that quite a few non white voters are in a wait and see mode. Will white people in Iowa and New Hampshire vote for him? Okay, he wins there and people are taking a bit more notice of him… Now, what about South Carolina? Will white people vote for him there, Jewishness and all?
Maybe most importantly, can he make the case to non white voters that he is more than a “message candidate” (ala Nader, Jesse Jackson, John Edwards, so on… great message, little or no chance of widespread votes? Or of implementing promised policies.) Because I know very few people of color who vote for message candidates… the consequences are too dire. Even, for Black folks, Obama had to prove he could win across the spectrum before there was widespread national support for his candidacy.
So, I think Bernie’s numbers among poorer voters, non-white voters (and even higher income voters) make a lot of sense at this point in time. He does have room to grow, but I think he has to do some convincing that not only does he have a great platform (if he can get even half of it thru Congress) but that he can win.
I would suspect that a lot of these folks don’t support Sanders because they don’t know who he is. Until they do, no other reason is necessary.